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A Custom Closet Wardrobe woodworker's tricks for dressing up simple plywood carcases Despite the sophisticated look of the finished wardrobe, the basic structure is simply five boxes made of %-in. cherry plywood. by Philip S. Sollman tramped from our bedroom to the other side of the house to get to a closet so that we could get dressed. Probably because we built the house ourselves, we hadn't gotten around to the built-in clothes storage for the master bedroom. Our bedroom is a 16-ft. by 26-ft. rectangle with E Behind closed doors. The center unit opens to reveal banks of drawers below a marble counter and smaller drawers, sweater bins and a mirror above (photo above). The lighted valance continues on the inside of the center doors. Veneered plywood. Bookmatched cherry veneers cover the plywood doors across the front of the wardrobe (left photo). The close-up photo shows the integral pulls routed into the doors along the wane edge of the veneer. the bed roughly in the middle, facing tall, second-floor windows that overlook a distant coppice to the south. The blank wall on the opposite end of the room was the obvious location for the closet wardrobe. Over morning coffee in bed, Jeanne and I would discuss alternative designs for the muchneeded closet wardrobe. Initially, I had envisioned an open dressing unit, which would be centered on the wall with enclosed closets on both sides. Jeanne balked at this idea, and she urged that everything be placed behind doors. I'd been hinting to Jeanne about deserving a new fly rod at the end of this project, so my strategy was not to make any waves. I didn't see the sense in opening a door to pull open a drawer, but I conceded that it would provide for a cleaner look and would allow me to do something interesting with the doors. All the while I was thinking about the fly rod this concession could produce. Drawing: Michael Hiotakis the last three years my wife, Jeanne, and I Designing to fit the space The wall to the left of the wardrobe has a large window that's about 4 ft. from the corner. I had crowned this window with a valance that concealed a curtain track. I stopped the valance 2\-2 ft. short of the corner in anticipation of the future wardrobe. I decided it would look good to incorporate the valance into the design of the wardrobe (bottom left photo, facing page). This provided some visual continuity in the room and defined the height of the unit. The generous space left between the wardrobe and the ceiling would be perfect for displaying some of Jeanne's clay sculptures. She liked the idea, and I silently congratulated myself-I could feel that fly rod in my hand. The exposed rafters in the cathedral ceiling are spaced 3 ft. 9 in. apart. Because of their visual proximity to the wardrobe, this dimension determined the width of the individual compartments. There are four rafters, which meant that I ended up with five compartments. The three in the middle are of equal width; the two on the ends are about 20 in. wide. A broad expanse of doors had the potential of looking plain and uninteresting, so I extended the center unit of the wardrobe past the flanking units. This created interesting niches to the left - August/September 1993 71